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Giant Unilamellar Vesicles Electroformed from Native Membranes and Organic Lipid Mixtures under Physiological Conditions

L.-Ruth Montes ^*, Alicia Alonso ^*, Felix M. Goñi ^* and Luis A. Bagatolli 

^* Unidad de Biofísica (Centro Mixto CSIC-UPV/EHU) and Departamento de Bioquímica, Universidad del País Vasco, 48080 Bilbao, Spain; and MEMPHYS Center for Biomembrane Physics/Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark, 5230 Odense M, Denmark

Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Luis A. Bagatolli, MEMPHYS Center for Biomembrane Physics, Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark. Tel.: 45-65-50-34-76; Fax: 45-65-50-40-48; E-mail: bagatolli{at}memphys.sdu.dk.

In recent years, giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) have become objects of intense scrutiny by chemists, biologists, and physicists who are interested in the many aspects of biological membranes. In particular, this "cell size" model system allows direct visualization of particular membrane-related phenomena at the level of single vesicles using fluorescence microscopy-related techniques. However, this model system lacks two relevant features with respect to biological membranes: 1), the conventional preparation of GUVs currently requires very low salt concentration, thus precluding experimentation under physiological conditions, and 2), the model system lacks membrane compositional asymmetry. Here we show for first time that GUVs can be prepared using a new protocol based on the electroformation method either from native membranes or organic lipid mixtures at physiological ionic strength. Additionally, for the GUVs composed of native membranes, we show that membrane proteins and glycosphingolipids preserve their natural orientation after electroformation. We anticipate our result to be important to revisit a vast variety of findings performed with GUVs under low- or no-salt conditions. These studies, which include results on artificial cell assembly, membrane mechanical properties, lipid domain formation, partition of membrane proteins into lipid domains, DNA-lipid interactions, and activity of interfacial enzymes, are likely to be affected by the amount of salt present in the solution.

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